Eliminate Bias by using Gamified Assessments

Do you know what frustrates thousands of applicants who aspire to work for well reputed organisations? It’s having all the right experience, credentials and qualifications and yet not being able to secure a job. Why is does it happen so often? What’s really holding them back? It’s simple. It’s the recruiter’s and hiring manager’s bias that’s holding good candidates back.

However, I don’t blame the recruiters or the hiring managers completely for being biased. I know you are probably thinking bias is an absolute negative emotion that shouldn’t find its place in the recruitment process, and yet I’m not blaming the hiring managers for being biased. When you really think about it, bias is a normal human behaviour that you simply cannot avoid, as hard as you may try to overcome it. It just creeps in when you’re evaluating a candidate.

Why Are Recruiters Biased?

Hiring managers and recruiters often walk into interviews with a completely unbiased frame of mind. They try their level best to give each candidate an equal opportunity to present their merit. In fact, even before the actual interview, most hiring managers and recruiters will review resumes free of bias as well. However, that’s just on the surface of it. When you really think about it, freeing your mind of bias is pretty challenging. Why’s that?

There are several reasons bias kicks in when selecting candidates. When evaluating a candidate whose background (qualification or experience) is similar to an employee who the hiring manager had a bad experience with, you can expect that candidate isn’t going to be shortlisted. Try as much as they will, a previous negative experience is enough to leave a bad taste in the hiring manager’s mouth to avoid giving any other candidate with a similar profile a chance. Now in reality, this new candidate could potentially be the right fit, however, their chances have been zeroed out thanks to a negative past, resulting in bias.

Similarly, hiring managers often, unknowingly, are inclined to shortlist those candidates that are similar to themselves. It could be a similar experience, demographic, university or even personality. When a candidate presents themselves to the hiring manager with any of these factors that are similar, you can expect their chances of being hired to be high. Again, a biased approach, yet something that’s often unintentional.

Resumes often lead to bias mainly because they either say too much or too little. When selecting candidates, the younger candidates suffer because of the lack of depth in their resume, while the older ones may be impacted by irrelevant past experiences. Because of these limitations, as a hiring manager you’re missing out on what your candidates can really offer you and your company.

Most HR departments impart several training around recruitment and interviewing skills to their hiring managers, yet, somehow, somewhere along the way, personal and professional bias just slips by. These hiring managers don’t even know that they’re being biased. Which is why I can’t hold it against them. However, I can recommend a way to eliminate bias.

The Future of Talent Acquisition

So there’s bias in the recruitment process. However, your organisation has a reputation of being unbiased, merit-focused and transparent, all the while being selective of who they induct into their culture. Your company’s employer brand is at stake here. You need a solution that’s going to help you eliminate bias from the recruitment process. gamified assessments is a possible solution.

With gamified assessments you can recruit talent that’s rightly fitted for your company using the realities of AI and eliminating bias and errors from human judgement. With gamified assessments you can measure cognitive, social and personality traits of candidates. This will provide you more objective markers than the traditional resumes, cover letters and interviews. And it’ll be free of bias so that you can truly assess candidates’ job compatibility.

Gamified assessments bring all candidates on a level playing field. In the gamified world you’re as good as your capabilities and skills allow you to be, irrespective of what you’ve done in the past and what you’ve stated in your resume. Candidates are evaluated on their abilities and skills thus creating a fair opportunity for everyone to shine.

And that’s not all. Along with eliminating bias, using gamified assessments companies can:

Enhance and improve their candidate experience,

Increase their ability to access more talent pool,

Bring efficiencies into their recruitment process, and

Recruit talent that’s rightly aligned with their culture.

If you’re really looking to hire top candidates, talent that’s really the right fit and will deliver from the first day, then you simply cannot have a recruitment process that’s ridden with loopholes such as bias. Using gamified assessments looks like a good way to avoid bias, and attract a more diverse pool of talent.